


304. constellations

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [110]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 04:12:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8313562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: The stars are so bright out here in the woods.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So I just spent five minutes looking at a website of Ukrainian constellations -- if anything Helena says in here is incorrect, please let me know!

The stars are so bright out here. Sarah knows they aren’t that far from civilization – she can see the city lights in the distance – but sitting in this chair outside Helena’s hut the stars seem like they go on forever. Endless. Infinite. Almost too much to stand – the quiet, the starlight, the cold. She wants to run. She wants something to fight.

Instead, she gets: Helena, crunching through the snow holding a bunch of branches. Sarah has no idea how she found them. Sarah actually has no idea how Helena does anything she does out here; she didn’t think the Proletheans would teach wilderness survival skills. But on the other hand, Helena seems so – happy, here. Like she fits. Like she was made for this.

“You should go inside,” Helena says, using her belly as a table for the twigs. “You will catch cold. And there are no chickens for soup, only deers.”

“Stars are bright out here,” Sarah says, looking up. It smells like shit inside and it makes her claustrophobic, but she’s not telling Helena that.

Helena looks up. “Oh,” she says. “Yes.” She tilts her head back and forth. “Look, you can see the gate.”

“The what?”

Helena points in a vague direction. There definitely are stars there.

“Sorry,” Sarah says, “think I learned the Big Dipper when I was a kid, but that’s all I got.”

Helena shrugs a shoulder; she drops the twigs in a heap, sits down on the nearest stump. Sarah belatedly realizes she should have offered her the one singular chair, but she doesn’t move. If she stays very still she’s warm. (She hasn’t yet sunk to the level of asking Helena to make her a fur blanket…cape…thing.)

“ _Baran, zubr, brama_ ,” she says. “Ram, bull, gate.”

“Oh, shit,” Sarah says. “Zodiac! Then the – crab, and the lion, and shit.”

Helena gives her a blank look. Opens her mouth. Closes it. “Okay,” she says.

“Always thought Gemini was the twins,” Sarah says. She tilts her head back all the way, but she can’t see anything up there. No shapes. Just light.

Helena heaves herself back to her feet and leans over Sarah. She smells terrible, but in a comforting sort of way. Her finger traces out a shape. “There,” she says quietly. “The gate. It was my favorite. When I was very little, I used to think I could climb through it and be somewhere else.”

“And now?” Sarah says quietly.

“Now I am happy where I am,” Helena says. “So I do not really want to go anywhere.”

She just sort of leaves that statement there, like it’s nothing. She stands back up, heads for the fire that’s still valiantly struggling to life under its wire grate. “Do you want hot chocolates,” she says. “ _Sestra_ Alison sent packets. You stir them with your finger and they turn from powder to drinks.”

“Yeah, cheers,” Sarah says. She breathes through her mouth, _hhaa_ , watches her breath billowing. “Helena?”

“Yes, _sestra?_ ”

“When d’you think you’re gonna come back?”

“To city,” Helena says, without looking up from the fire.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” Helena says. “Not yet. Not soon.”

“You’re gonna need to come back to have your babies, though, yeah?”

She watches the ripple of Helena shrugging under her collection of blankets and pelts. “Maybe.”

Somewhere in the distance something howls. It’s so quiet – just Sarah’s breathing, and Helena rummaging around to find hot chocolate, and the silent weight of all those stars.

“We’d miss you,” Sarah says. The words are soft; they fall onto the snow without a sound, but they’re there and they’re real.

Helena stops and tilts her head to look at Sarah. The fire lights half her face in light, and half her face in shadow. Gemini the twins. Gemini the gate to somewhere you’ve never been before.

“Then I will come back,” she says. It sounds final, like she’s decided. She nods, once, and turns back to the fire.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
